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FILM REVIEW; A Buddy Movie Of Arch Rivals

It's a novel notion. No, not turning an old television series into a feature film, as the director Betty Thomas and her team have done with ''I Spy,'' but rather shoehorning two actors who are born scene-stealers -- Eddie Murphy and Owen Wilson -- into a buddy comedy.

The casting is as absurd as a remake of ''Shaft'' starring Reese Witherspoon; it's funnier in the concept than in the execution. And in this case, there are far more laughs in the idea of Mr. Murphy and Mr. Wilson fighting to upstage each other than there are in the movie.

It's freakish, too, for this kind of grandstanding to be happening in a film derived from a television show that was based on chemistry and the two stars falling in love with each other's styles. By the end of the last season of the 1960's comic spy drama, Robert Culp had broken free of his upright WASP-y posture and adopted his co-star Bill Cosby's jazzy fluidity. Mr. Culp had become the small screen's first white Negro; Norman Mailer, who coined the phrase, would have been proud. The chemistry in the new film version, however, is like combining hydrogen and oxygen; and here the product is as bland as H2O.

The slim plot and its predictable third-act twist, which it apparently took at least four writers to cobble together, involves the theft of the Switchblade, the newest example of United States Stealth plane technology, by evildoers. That's the word used by the spy boss, McIntyre (Bill Mondy, whose static-cling hair suggests the producer Brian Grazer). McIntyre assigns the bumbling special agent Alexander Scott (Mr. Wilson) to retrieve the stolen plane from the evildoer Gundars (Malcolm McDowell, who also sports a mucho-mousse hairdo).

Scott is hooked up with the megalomaniacal boxing champ Kelly Robinson (Mr. Murphy). When he isn't blowing kisses to his upper arms, which are tattooed with his 57 knockouts, Robinson is sending opponents to the mat with a flurry of uppercuts. The president himself phones Robinson and asks the champ to go to Eastern Europe with Scott, serving as part of Scott's cover, so that they can infiltrate one of Gundars's huge parties and find out where the Switchblade is hidden. ''We can't find it, because we can't see it,'' Scott explains to Robinson.

You can't envy Ms. Thomas, who can be quite good with actors. She calmed Mr. Murphy down to a slow burn in the 1998 ''Dr. Dolittle'' remake; he relaxed enough to coast on straight-man star presence. But staging action scenes isn't her thing, to put it mildly. The martial sequences seem as tacky as the surveillance equipment that the second-string spy Robinson has been given. (He says the devices ''look like they came from Radio Shack in 1972.'')

As the frenetic boxer, Mr. Murphy is so pumped up and fast-talking, you wonder why this fighter hasn't been given a drug test before he steps into the ring. Mr. Murphy has every reason to be proud of his buffed physique; the 41-year-old star could pass for a 25-year-old. And he still has the energy of a kid, although his steady patter can be wearying -- you almost think he must be doing it to stay awake. His Robinson, with his posse of alternately jittery and arrogant sycophants, is a parody of egomania.

Mr. Murphy is still doing the all-id hostility of Buddy Love, the swampy-depths alter ego of ''The Nutty Professor.'' It's a shame to see him treading water after proving he could act and still light up a theater with hilarity in the ''Professor'' pictures. As for the buddy comedy, Mr. Murphy proved he could beat down the confines of the genre 20 years ago in his film debut, ''48 Hrs.''

Mr. Wilson emerged essentially as himself in his first film, ''Bottle Rocket.'' He turned his Texas hippie wheedling -- he always sounds as if he has just put down a bong before stepping into camera range -- into a comic style from the git-go. His light, high voice and stoner's politesse are an intriguing contrast to his surfer's good looks and busted-nose profile; he looks as if he has spent more time in fights than Robinson has. His molasses-slow (and sweet) cadence masks the venom in his patter; there's an insult tucked away in almost every line he speaks.

Fans of the old television series may be outraged that more of the show isn't used here, but there's no reason to use more. The miraculous work of Mr. Cosby and Mr. Culp and Earle Hagen's martial bossa nova theme aside, not much was going on there. It was mostly a travelogue, with the bravura banter stitching together the holes between the Elvis Presley-style karate battles.

The movie version of ''I Spy'' reverses the ''Gunga Din'' center of the old television show, in which Mr. Culp was a tennis pro and Mr. Cosby his trusty trainer. The joke came out of the fact that Mr. Cosby stole the show because he was a much more charismatic and subtle actor. There's probably a laugh for fans of Mr. Murphy since he began his career needling Mr. Cosby's relentlessly G-rated paterfamilias/huckster. Yet in ''Dolittle,'' he was spiritually evoking Mr. Cosby's dappled smoothness, and with ''I Spy,'' Mr. Murphy is now playing an old Cosby part; he has become what he beheld.

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The picture also tries to mine a joke out of turning Robinson, a man who probably can't brush his teeth without turning it into a stage entrance, into an undercover brother.

Given that the stars are constantly battling to one-up each other with their wildly varying performance techniques, there's not really a moment when they connect. What laughs ''I Spy,'' which opens nationwide today, generates come from Robinson's contradicting himself. He refuses to do something, and in the very next scene he's going along with what he swore he wouldn't do.

The best scene in the picture comes when Scott and Robinson are hiding out from Gundars's evildoers in a sewer, and the mezzo-masculine Robinson is confessing his inner self. And there's a reversal of that joke in a Cyrano-type bit when Robinson instructs Scott -- via a bug in his ear -- on how to seduce his svelte fellow operative Rachel (Famke Janssen). He's helping the white boy find his inner Mack, giving Scott lines from ''Sexual Healing'' to get his groove on.

Even the handful of moments that are amusing feel recycled from old sketches of Mr. Murphy's. Ms. Thomas tries to use the put-on ironies that she exploited so successfully in ''The Brady Bunch Movie'' by giving Scott and Robinson another nemesis: the superspy Carlos, Scott's dashing colleague in the organization who gets first crack at the great gear and choice assignments.

As played by the old Thomas hand (and her fellow Chicagoan) Gary Cole, Carlos -- with his shoe-polish black hair and ponytail -- is a Euro-trash version of Steven Seagal, if that's not redundant. His vanity is outdated, in contrast to Robinson's hip-hop heat.

But the small touches aren't enough to rescue ''I Spy.'' The old show took something negligible and made it sui generis; this new version is just plain generic.

Directed by Betty Thomas; written by Marianne Wibberley, Cormac Wibberley, Jay Scherick and David Ronn, based on a story by Marianne Wibberley and Cormac Wibberley; director of photography, Oliver Wood; edited by Peter Teschner; music by Richard Gibbs; production designer, Marcia Hinds-Johnson; produced by Jenno Topping, Ms. Thomas, Mario Kassar and Andy Vajna; released by Columbia Pictures. Running time: 96 minutes. This film is rated PG-13.